After weeks of grueling meditation, Orton's efforts had finally been rewarded; his aenimus had achieved the first tier of transmundane constituence, and with it he had regained the first major expansion of his sight beyond sight. Like a blind man slowly learning to see again, he grappled and struggled with the sensations as they alternately blinded and overwhelmed him; his progress was much faster than it had any right to be (given his truly prodigious amount of experience with this phenomenon) but still painfully slow and difficult. Yesterday, after a great deal of practice and calibration, he had managed to regain his passive aurasight, and now he was weathering the inevitable adjustment period of being exposed to everyone's spiritual essentiality while he was trying to eat his breakfast.

An additional unfortunate side effect was that he could also see his own aura at all times, which made him wince whenever he did anything that discolored or distorted it. Since many of the things which made life tolerable to him in his current situation (such as having petty thoughts, indulging in selfish fantasies, or eating deeply regrettable foods) had immediate and visibly negative effects on said aura, he was currently feeling very put-upon. Having Nej offer a running commentary in his mind every time it happened didn't help, either.

Fortunately, passive aurasight was very useful for one thing: gauging Enna's progress and providing instant, highly-targeted feedback during her exercises, which provided a much-needed distraction during their training sessions. Orton, walking her through a guided meditation for the fourteenth time, finally glimpsed the telltale polychromatic sheen across the upper quadrant of her aura when she recited the invocation; he made a sound of satisfaction. "Okay," he said, "Great job. You're finally ready."

"Finally ready for what? The thirty-seventh lecture?" replied Enna dryly, keeping her eyes closed.

"Nope," said Orton, pulling out a small rubber ball and a trio of red Solo cups he'd liberated from the common room. "Ready for your first use of real magic."

Enna's eyes popped open, and an excited grin blossomed on her features. "Seriously? For real? This isn't a test or a trick?"

"Putting aside the part where that's hurtful and unkind, even you must logically admit that having a partner that can use actual magic is a lot more useful than a partner I just enjoy trolling." Orton showed her the cups and the ball, put the ball under the center cup, then executed a smooth and efficient shuffle of the three cups. "First, the normal way. Pick the cup that you think the ball is under." Enna did so, grimacing as she got it wrong; Orton was very good at sleight of hand. He demonstrated the correct location, then shuffled them again. "Okay. Now close your eyes, and I'll shuffle them some more; at that point, you should have no information whatsoever about the ball's location."

Enna frowned, but closed her eyes anyway. "What difference does that make?"

Orton shuffled the cups again. "I'll explain in a minute. First, open your eyes and look at the cups." Enna's eyes opened, revealing their jade-colored depths; Orton tried not to think too hard about how pretty they were. "Now. If you were to pick at random, you'd have about a one-in-three chance of finding the ball; so instead, I want you to concentrate on sensing the location of the ball. Let your gaze unfocus, and try to see which cup looks different in your sight. This is intuitive magic, not a ritual, so it should be instinctive; but that said, you might not get it right on the first try, so don't be discouraged if you don't."

Enna frowned, letting her eyes wander a bit, and the cups grew fuzzy in her sight. Let's see. Anything different about one of them? A moment of contemplation revealed that, yes, one of the cups seemed to have a light blue tint to the light reflecting off the smooth plastic; she reached out and plucked the cup off the table hesitantly, then laughed with delight when she saw the ball was under it. "Oh my God, I did it! I can't believe it!"

"Good work." Orton smiled encouragingly, doing his best not to ruin the moment. "Now, doing that cost you a little bit of power; you're still learning to feel the shift within yourself for magical energy, so you might not sense it yet. But you'll definitely sense it after this next one." He took the cup back, shuffled the ball around again, then closed his own eyes. "Now, I want you to shuffle the cups, then close your eyes. Tell me when you're done."

Enna, feeling a little puzzled, did as she was told; when she was finished, Orton shuffled the cups a third time, then bade her open her eyes again. "Now, as you can see, the cups have been shuffled in such a way that neither of us now knows where the ball is; in quantum terms, its position is indeterminate. You could still divine its location if you tried, either intuitively or using an actual divination ritual, but instead you're going to do something far more useful." He pointed at the cup to his left. "I want you to make the ball be under this cup specifically."

Enna blinked. "What? How's that going to work?"

"The location of the ball is unknown to either of us; that means it is equally likely to be under any of these three cups. Since no observers have prior information about its location, there's virtually no weight of entropy around that attribute, and you can exert your own magical power to shift it into whatever position you want." Orton did not bother explaining that this was actually more a matter of shifting oneself than anything else; it was still about eighteen months too early for Spoon Boy metaphors. "There are rituals you can use to make this easier, but as a sorceress, you shouldn't need any of them for entropy this light. Just decide that the ball will be under the cup in question, and exert your quiddity -- that same flexing feeling you had during your meditation."

Enna screwed up her eyes and pursed her mouth; Orton, with a valiant and heroic effort, managed not to giggle. She blinked slowly, raised one hand in a clawlike gesture, and snatched the cup away triumphantly -- only to have a wave of crushing disappointment collapse on her when the ball was not revealed. "Damn it! What did I do wrong?"

"Your aura didn't flicker; you were tensing your body, instead of focusing your mind. I said this would take you a few tries; be patient." Orton repeated the shuffle, setting things up again, but she failed the next two times also; by the fourth attempt, she was visibly steaming to Orton's perceptions.

"Aaargh, this is so stupid!" She ran her hands through her auburn locks in frustration. "Why can't you just show me the ritual?!"

"The ritual is a crutch you don't need," intoned Orton serenely, shuffling the cups yet again. "If you were a wizard, I would have started with that to begin with; but you're not a wizard, Enna. You're a sorceress, and you can feel the flow of magic without the need for chants or diagrams, which is a gift a lot of people would covet if it were something they could take from you." There were, in fact, ways to take her gift from her, but they were horrifying, grisly, and not important to this topic of conversation, so he skipped over that. "The point is that you're learning to use an entirely new part of yourself that you've never used before; nobody learns how to walk without falling."

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"Easy for you to say," muttered Enna, scowling at the cups again. "How do you even know I'm a sorceress, anyway?"

"Ignoring the whole 'I know everything about your past life and also trained you once already' stuff," responded Orton, "you just proved it at the start of this exercise. A wizard can't sense an object's location without a ritual. That's only something a sorcerer can do."

"Bullshit." Her lip curled up at him in a sneer. "I see you do all kinds of stuff without rituals."

"No, you see me do all kinds of stuff without rituals you can see. I mastered meta-rituals on my first loop; it lets me do the rituals in my mind, provided I have the extra power and attention to spare." Orton shrugged. "I still have to do physical rituals for alchemical spells, though; it's surprisingly difficult to visualize a sufficiently detailed abstraction for crabapples."

Enna crossed her arms over her chest, her eyes full of frustration and skepticism; Orton winced. Her aura looked like a black eye. "That's awfully convenient. What next? Are you going to tell me that you have special spells that require me to be ignorant, so you can have more excuses to keep things from me?"

Damn, said Nej's voice in his mind, she ain't gonna like the answer to that 'un. Orton sighed. "I do, in fact, have spells like that, but in this case, that's not what's happening. I'm just trying to --"

"Well you're trying and failing, Orton!" She threw up her hands in frustration. "It's not working!"

"Keep trying," said Orton, though his own patience was definitely beginning to fray. "You'll get this. Just focus your energy, gather your nous, and pick up the cup --"

"Fuck the cup!" Enna burst out suddenly, lashing out with a flailing hand and knocking over the cup. The cup, launched with the force of her pent-up frustration, flew through the air quite powerfully and hit Orton in the face; he came within a micron of losing his own temper, and it was only a murmured warning from Nej that kept him from doing something regrettable. He closed his eyes and sucked in a deep breath, then let it out slowly and calmly. I will handle my shit, he thought resolutely. Gritting his psychic teeth, he opened his eyes again and prepared for everything to be his fault, as usual; but what he saw made his anger melt away.

Enna's face was a portrait of shock; her mouth hung open and her eyes bulged out of her head, and her breath was making tiny squeaking sounds. Orton looked down; where the cup had stood was not an empty section of table, as he had expected, but neither was there a rubber ball. Instead, there was a beautifully folded origami dodecahedral shape, apparently constructed with exacting precision from several hundred-dollar bills. Orton raised his eyebrows, then looked up at Enna. "Still think this is bullshit?"

Enna couldn't speak; she could barely think. She reached out, disbelieving, and picked up the ball of money; it was a tremendously impossible object. The folds were inhumanly strict; whoever had made this had definitely used some form of mechanical assistance. "What... how? I don't... what?"

Orton shrugged. "You're asking the wrong guy. Your power did this, remember?"

"Orton, what the hell?" She kept turning the ball in different directions, peering at it quizzically. "Did you swap it out when I wasn't looking?"

Orton rubbed the back of his head, making his hair even more of a mess than usual. "So, the funny thing about that is that, in order for this to be possible at all, there had to be a quantum state where that occurred. But I definitely don't have any memory of doing it, or even of getting or making something like that in the first place." He looked around suspiciously. "But if you moved us into a universe where I did, other things might have changed too -- which is one of the other big dangers of using too much magic. Move us too far from our origin, and suddenly we'll be trespassing instead of renting." He let out a breath, then focused back on Enna. "But getting back on topic, if you changed the object's composition in addition to its location, that's a lot of power. It's a much bigger entropy shift than I was expecting, and you should definitely feel the difference in your xià dāntián."

Enna closed her eyes, searching, and whistled. "Whoof. Yeah, I feel really... I don't know, fuzzy?" She waved her hands noncommittally. "'Less solid', I guess?"

Orton nodded. "That's a good way to describe it." He started cleaning up the cups. "That's enough for today, but the basic techniques should come a lot easier to you at this point. The easiest powers for you at this stage will be intuitive techniques like these: basic divination and probability control. Now that you know what it feels like, it will get easier, and you'll be able to do small things like find things without knowing where they are, or turn up a quarter in your pocket that you didn't put there. If you're creative, you can do a lot with that."

Enna rolled the ball of money between her fingers contemplatively. "So I could find anything in my pockets? Like a gun, if I wanted?"

Orton nodded. "It would take a lot of power, though; a gun isn't something you would put in your pockets accidentally or without thinking about it, so the probability shift to make that happen retroactively is fairly huge. A much simpler way of doing the same thing is to swap the locations of an object you know you have from somewhere else to wherever is convenient; that's how I turned your lamp into a frog and magically cleaned my laundry, for example."

"Hah!" She pointed at him triumphantly. "I knew that frog thing was bullshit!"

Orton folded his arms and smirked. "I turned your lamp into a frog. The specifics are just window dressing."

Abruptly, the tension in the room evaporated; Enna laughed and hugged him impulsively, and Orton reeled a little from the emotional whiplash but managed to stay upright, both figuratively and literally, as Nej chimed in mentally. Teaching girls magic to score, boy? That ain't exactly honorable, the dead man's voice taunted in his mind. Orton ignored him with ease; ignoring Nej was another thing he had a lot of practice with.

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On the other side of town, treachery was afoot.

The restaurant was called "Podnuh's BAR-B-Q", which was not the sort of place one tended to think of when contemplating the sale of illicit magical artifacts. For one thing, it was a chain restaurant, which automatically robbed the place of some of the necessary authenticity for a clandestine meeting location; for another, it was folksy and cheerful instead of being shadowy and ominous. Cameron sat and waited, sipping on his iced tea; he had absolutely no intention of ordering the blasphemous heresy that passed for barbecue anywhere outside the Lone Star State, and especially not in a franchise. A man had to have standards.

The trail of the money had gone cold as expected, but Baton Rouge was lousy with cheap security cameras; flashing his directive badge had gotten him plenty of evidence, and Cameron needed very little to sniff out a trail. He'd blazed his way through a broker, two fixers, and a very confused knitting supply store clerk to find the next name on his list; setting up a meeting had been even more convoluted, since he'd had to pretend interest in buying whatever this guy was selling. This had, at least, been easier than it might have been some time back; the wizard kid had at least allowed him to consider the possibility that the supplier might be selling more than ground-up tiger penis pills.

He was, of course, being set up. Either the trader was in bed with the Agency, or he had been manipulated into the increasingly byzantine sequence of events which had sent the agents to Cameron's hotel room; either way, the real architects of the operation would hardly stand by and let this joker get himself publicly interrogated in a cordial and genteel manner. So all he had to do now was figure out where the trap was and then spring it, preferably before it took his head off.

At precisely the appointed hour, the door's bell rang; Cameron did not look up, but instead tracked the nebulous figure of the restaurant's most recent patron through the various reflective surfaces around him, of which there were many. The gentleman approached his table and sat down without a greeting, which Cameron minded not at all. There was a dignity in forthrightness.

"So," he began, raising his eyes to the other man's, "I understand you're the fella to see about items what might be called, uh, antiquities."

The very much alive and heretofore highly successful specialty goods reseller known as Nej smoothed his apron and examined a menu. "I conjure I might be."